Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s book Camera is strange and funny, and blatantly philosophical. The first half of the book reminded me of Seinfeld episodes, a French version, with vignettes from a life where nothing much happens but much is mulled over. The narrator’s bizarre courtship of the woman from the drivers ed office, their long wait for a table at the Indian restaurant (sound familiar, Seinfeld aficionados?), the search for propane gas, the meeting with the girlfriend’s dad, the conference with her kid’s teacher, and the time the dad’s car breaks down — the novel exhibits the same twisted turns of fate and whiffs of humor that swung high and low through Seinfeld.
But then the second half of the novel turns serious. Our narrator is in love and the attachment makes him look hard at himself. Always self-absorbed but never self-analyzing, the camera is now turned on himself and our man questions life itself: “I was alone in the semi-darkness of the [photo] booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course….alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.” That is the moment of transition in the novel: before this moment, our man was conqueror in the struggle of living, having perfected a nonchalant, go with the flow, self-centered stance on life: nothing could bother him, everything was taken as it came at him with little commitment on his part, and little emotion.
But now, suddenly, he is thrown into the can of worms known as: WHY? Here is where philosophy takes over the novel; from this point on, the big Why of existence kicks in, of actions to be taken or not, of the future coming full speed and why? The “despair of being” strikes the very soul of our narrator and he must look hard at himself. The irony is that the left-behind camera he steals from a bar banquette in a moment of philosophical crisis has no recordings of who he is, no reflections of him at all: the only pictures that come through the film development intact are of strangers. This is the ultimate despair, when you cannot even find yourself.
Even in this second half of the novel, Toussaint’s great sense of humor comes through. At point the narrator insists on a glass for his half-bottle of Sancerre from the cross-channel ferry’s barman: “it didn’t seem to me to be an extravagant request. A stemmed glass, if you could, I added cautiously (better to be picky than embittered in life, right?).” Right, and so funny — and even funnier, the glass he ends up with is a cleaned-out mustard jar “adorned with smurfs“.
The narrator’s philosophical crisis vents itself through long flowing sentences worthy of late nights and much wine; so eloquent are the narrator’s words that I am sure he’ll come through his philosophical crisis well-placed and intact, and quite possibly alone. There is safety in solitariness, and his mind seems awfully crowded to add in one more set of musings, one other person’s thoughts. This is a novel about sparking a connection with another, and then raging against what that connection might require; it is a novel about connecting the dots in your own mind and leaving anyone else out in the cold. As the narrator says, “Hours passed in unvarying sweetness and my thoughts continued to maintain amongst themselves a network of sensual and fluid relationships, as if they were continuously adhering to a play of mysterious and complex forces that would come at times and stabilize them into an almost palpable point of my mind and at other times wold have them fight a moment against the current to return immediately to their infinite course in the peaceful, silent state of my mind.“ Not thoughts for Tom’s Diner, and probably not for the driver’s ed lady, either. This is a man alone in the universe, the actual universe and the universe of his thoughts.
Camera was translated by Michael B. Smith
